Films that aren't so good

Manages to walk the unenviable tightrope of cynical and sappy, featuring a (as we well learn) punchably naive protagonist and a yarf-worthy orchestral score in key moments of emotional denouement. Tries to sauce it up with shovelfuls of comic relief. Fails.

Ooooooo, how indie.

Thinking about this movie makes me kind of angry. It's of that breed of cringe-inducing melodrama that substitutes histrionics for heart. It's full of dumb, unlovable people who do stupid things to themselves and others for no other reason than to manufacture plot/tension. It utilizes sophomoric film techniques trying to convince you it's deep. It's largely unappealing visually taking on an overly wan affect most of the time. In summation: ugh.

We're gonna hafta quit the land son. The well done dried up.

A massively disappointing film that betrays an intriguing premise and thoroughly wastes the talents of Emmanuel Lubezki proving once and for all that it doesn't matter if a thing looks pretty if it smells like *beep* Really I cannot overemphasize what a letdown this movie is.

I love Ewan McGregor. He is a terrific actor, but he was likely miscast as Jesus. He still manages to give the best performance found in the film, but that's really not saying much.

I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but it's plain to see that his progeny lacks his genius.

I love Emmanuel Lubezki, but his work is in the service of terrible material and lacks his signature flair. He comes off as a hired gun in this film, but not even Wild Bill Hickock and Doc Holliday combined could have won out against the cannonade of crap that fusillades the plotting of this sad, sad movie.

Nothing ever makes sense. It is a showcase in how not to plot your movie. Logic takes a vacation. Moment to moment the whole thing has an air of "oh, now this is happening". Nevermind that it shouldn't be. The dialogue is also largely poor.

Sadly, these things aren't even the worst of it. That honor goes to Tye Sheridan who is appallingly bad, torpedoing any and all scenes he is in. And he is in many. Oh so many.

I loved the trailer.

A pointless movie that underserves its characters and offers little to nothing in the way of arcs. It's overlong and heavy handed featuring boring acting consisting of little more than stoicism and grimace. Pass.

Look, you can tell that the Farrellys love the Stooges. So much care goes into the replication of the Stooges particular brand of vaudeville chicanery that you can't help but be somewhat impressed. But their obvious affection is the only thing that gives this shambolic affair the breath of life and even it comes off as somehow unclean a vacuous, to-the-letter imitation that fails to add anything new to the formula.

Throwing the Stooges antics headlong into the 21st Century is, in its essence, an unholy act, and the resultant Frankenstein is just as uncomfortable with its forced animation as Shelley's.

The peculiar brand of violent naivete that animates the classic shorts doesn't seem to jell at all with a more cynical modern world that is much less willing to suspend its disbelief and this general dissonance is compounded by a seeming need on the Farrellys' part to have the Stooges' hi-jinks be even more outsized and larcenous than ever before, accompanied by an exponential increase in their overall stupidity, making them into fully-fledged cartoon characters rather than the exaggerated Depression-era working man types they actually were.

Nowhere is this more felt than during a mid-film set piece attempting to recreate the Stooges' classic seltzer battles in which the Farrellys can't help but inject an element of toilet humor. I don't have the stomach to describe the incident in detail but it depleted whatever stores of goodwill I might have had towards the film and reduced me to continuing on if only to see what barbarous thing they might do next.

An unpleasant cynical film chock full of gratuitous violence. It's incredibly heavy handed and topical to the point where it feels dated after only four years. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

I defend the first few Pirates movies as enjoyable despite their flaws, but this is the one where Fonzi meets the jet ski.

The film equivalent of acid reflux.

Not terrible but it is reaching, trying to be better than it is. It features unrelatable characters and unfleshed plot elements. And it's just too cute.

An unpleasant blundering misfire that has no characters, plenty of caricatures, a shoddy misshapen plot, queer motivations, and healthy amounts of bad acting and writing both. Easily the worst thing the Coen Brothers have done. You may obtain a thrill from it in the same sense that you may catch yourself agog at a grotesquerie, but only if you're into that sort of thing.

Honestly has some great chase scenes and the car choreography is excellent but it is in no sense worth slogging through the incredibly cliched plot elements and flat characterizations to get to the good bits.

Almost textbook in its utter inadequacy. Goes Spinal Tap on treacly inspirational sports michigas, complete with overbearing score, nonsense pseudo-philosophy dispensed from the wise (cum divine) sidekick, an annoying child actor, and unnecessary voiceover/framing device. Add in its uniquely unsatisfying elements of dubious historical accuracy, a romanticism of the old south complete with tried and true negro servility, and the hokey direction of Robert Redford and, yep, you've got a bad picture.

Am I making it out to be worse than it is? Probably, but that doesn't make it good.

I watched this again recently, having previously banished it to the deepest recesses of my mind, hoping that perhaps it had found it's way into the vaunted "so bad it's good" territory reserved for those ill-conceived cornballs that somehow appreciate over time. Nope. Still Sucks. And in vaguely offensive ways too. 90% of the dialogue is garbage. The set pieces are lower-case "r" ridiculous. You spend most of the time just asking yourself "why?"

I just don't give a *beep* if anyone in this movie lives or dies. There are no stakes. It devolves into a boring shoot 'em up, gouge 'em out slog.

And it's a shame 'cause there's some inventive direction going on. It's technically very proficient. It looks good, it conjures an atmosphere.

This could be a good film. It aspires to high b-movie zaniness, but the storytelling aspect lets the whole thing down.

So damn long. It gives the viewer enough time to grow bored, fall asleep, wake up, grow bored and fall asleep again.

This is an epic without any flair for the visual that one might expect to accompany such a label.

It's a PG war movie, sanitized for your convenience. Though death is supposedly present (at least stage death anyway) there is little of the gruesomeness of war to be had.

It is trite and full of filmmaking cliches. The score is pretty darn bad. It hits the right note maybe once or twice in the whole film. There's has no feel for pacing or cutting. Pickett's charge seems to have been shot the whole length of the field giving us a nice view of walking extras. The sound design is clumsy. Its attempts at characterization are hackneyed and its attempts at character interaction, worse. Some lines of dialogue are just abysmal.

It does have some redeeming qualities.

In terms of its handling of subject matter it does more or less well enough. It accurately depicts the various actions central to the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. And while much of the violence has a definite staginess the general depiction of the engagements have a feel of authenticity. There are moments where it manages to make you care about its denizens in spite of itself.

But then a moment later it reminds that it's still amateur hour with a zoom for emphasis here and a dash of melodrama there.

It's obvious that it's a labor of love, but it would be better off if love's labors were lost in this case.

Stop, I plead.